News
| 2025 | |
|---|---|
| Jan 23 | The Veranda archive has come full circle. The project began with the goal of making Edward Thompson’s four Indian novels (An Indian Day, Night Falls on Shiva’s Hill, So a Poor Ghost, A Farewell to India) available in digital form. The archive now consists of nearly 450 works by over 100 authors. I have decided to complete the archive by adding all Thompson's published works: novels, dramas, poetry, and historical studies. |
| 2024 | |
| May 11 | I have decided to finish the Veranda Anglo-Indian literature project. As noted previously, many of Fanny Emily Penny’s novels continue to be unavailable, and I have been unable to locate a copy of B. M. Croker’s Bridget. The Veranda site will remain active, and errors will be corrected. |
| 2023 | |
| Nov 7 | Waseda University has moved faculty pages to a new hosting service. My new URI is https://buda.w.waseda.jp/. |
| Oct 2 | I’m still searching for copies of Fanny Emily Penny’s Anglo-Indian novels to add to my Veranda archive. Although copies of her mentor B. M. Croker’s novels are readily available, those of Penny are hard to find. Two novels that I located recently (Dark Corners and The Two Brides) are being shipped and will be added to the archive after formatting. |
| Feb 3 | I have added a small collection of religious poetry that I purchased on one of my visits to the Mount Saint Bernard Abbey in Charnwood Forest, Leicestershire. |
| Jan 31 | Although several modern translations of the Heike Monogatari (平家物語) are widely available, copies of A. L. Sadler’s pioneering translation are harder to find:
I have scanned my copy of the source and converted it to searchable PDF format. It is now available in the Library section of this website. |
| 2022 | |
| Jul 20 | The Veranda archive continues to grow. The original goal was to make available, in digital form, the novels of Edward Thompson and several other Anglo-Indian authors. It now contains over 440 volumes of fiction and non-fiction by 80 authors. The latest additions are novels by R. J. Minney and John Travers (Eva Mary Bell). |
| 2021 | |
| Dec 24 | I have added an old, but still relevant, article criticizing the recommendations of the Kingman Committee on changes in the English curriculum of UK schools: Let’s Concentrate on Shakespeare by Roger Knight appeared in the 25 August 1988 edition of The Independent. |
| Nov 3 | In the course of formatting B. M. Croker’s The Cat’s Paw for inclusion in the Veranda archive of Anglo-Indian literature, I came across an unattributed quotation that was both striking and appropriate. I was able to identify the author as Owen Meredith, the pen-name of Edward Robert Bulwer-Lytton, Viceroy of India from 1876 to 1880. Croker’s quotation is taken from the Epilogue to Marah, a posthumous collection of Bulwer-Lytton’s poems. A copy of Marah is now available in the library of this website. |
| Apr 18 | I’ve added a short interview with philosopher Patricia Smith Churchland to the Library section of this website. Churchland is the author of Neurophilosophy: Toward a Unified Science of the Mind-Brain (1986) and other notable studies of philosophy and neuroscience. |
| Apr 10 | I have been remiss in not updating the information stored on the researchmap infrastructure maintained by the National Institute of Informatics. I have remedied this and a list of my publications is now available at my researchmap portal. The only significant difference between the researchmap portal and this faculty website is the availability of PDF downloads of selected papers. |
| Feb 3 | With the completion of James Esdaile’s Mesmerism in India I shall be taking a break from the work of transcription and formatting. The Veranda archive now contains 160 volumes of fiction and non-fiction, with a reserve collection of approx. 30 volumes that I might add at a future date. |
| Jan 8 | I was fortunate to study under Prof. W. G. Beasley at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. Recently I acquired a leaflet he wrote for the Teaching of History series published by the Historical Association. The leaflet is dated 1962 but remains a valuable aid for the teaching of Far Eastern history. It is now available in the Library section of this site. In other news, visitors to the Anna Jane Vardill archive on this site will now be redirected to the archive’s permanent home at the Vardill Society website. |
| 2020 | |
| Dec 8 | My archive of Anglo-Indian literature has a name: The Veranda. It now contains several hundred items, including fiction, criticism, and ethnological studies such as Katherine Mayo’s Mother India and Lál Behári Day’s Bengal Peasant Life. I have abandoned the idea of moving the archive to its own domain and will maintain it as a sub-domain of the Vardill Society website. Although Kipling’s works are readily available on Project Gutenberg and the Internet Archive, I have decided that The Veranda would not be complete without a collection of Kipling’s India stories. Many of these I have not read in decades, and I find that my reaction to them has changed. I plan to write a short essay on Masonic inconsistencies in The Man Who Would Be King. |
| Sep 6 | A digital archive of some of my favourite Anglo-Indian novels was completed in January, by which time I had decided to expand the archive to include rare volumes, critiques, and memoirs. The archive is far from complete, but for the time being a provisional version is available at india.vardill.org. |
| Mar 25 | With the help of the Derbyshire Record Office, I have completed the transcription of the Attic Chest materials in the Gell Collection. These materials are now available on the Vardill Society website: attic.vardill.org. |
| 2019 | |
| Sep 3 | Over the years I have digitized many Anglo-Indian novels for my own reading convenience. I am considering free distribution of my digital versions as a contribution to the study of Anglo-Indian fiction. I have not yet chosen a site for these versions, but as a first step I hope to make the works of Henry Cunningham and Edward Thompson available before the end of this year. |
| Jul 16 | For the past eighteen months I have been transcribing submissions to the Attic Chest literary circle. Vardill was an enthusiastic contributor and many of her pieces later appeared in the European Magazine. The initial goal of selecting only Vardill's contributions was modified and a preliminary draft of the Attic Chest collection is now available at attic.vardill.org. |
| 2017 | |
| Nov 24 | The work of transcribing Vardill's contributions to the European Magazine is complete and the files have found a new home at vardill.org. The files on this Waseda site having been crawled by both Google and Bing will be preserved for the convenience of search engine users. All future additions, corrections, etc. will, however, be made to the vardill.org files. |
| Sep 28 | In the absence of easily accessible online archives of Anna Jane Vardill's literary works, I have undertaken the task of transcribing and editing poetry and prose published in The European Magazine, working from digital scans of copies preserved by the HathiTrust. I have started with items published in 1816 and will work forwards and backwards from that year, as the spirit moves me. |
| Jul 20 | Two memoirs have been added to the Library, one unpublished and one long out of print. Konstanty Buda's unpublished account of his role in organising the last transport of Polish soldiers and civilians from the U.S.S.R. to Iran provides an insight into Gen. Berling's decision to desert the Polish Army and remain in the Soviet Union. Edward Dzierżek's full-length account of his experiences as an internee coincides with Buda's memoir. |
| Mar 31 | I have retired and the 'Courses' page has been removed. Waseda University will continue to host this faculty site, but the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp sub-domain and its associated servers have been shut down. Educational materials from the sub-domain have been archived and will be migrated to this site, beginning with Email Guidelines |
| 2016 | |
| Jul 10 | The archive of Donald Philippi's Technical Japanese Translation newsletter is being converted to a responsive one-column layout that will make it easier to read on tablets and cellphones. Each article is being proofed and any remaining mistakes corrected. |
| 2015 | |
| Oct 02 | A copy of the entry on Japan in Advertising Education around the World, co-authored with Prof Kazue Shimamura, has been added to the Publications section. |
| 2014 | |
| Apr 01 | The Waseda University Course N@vi CMS is the worst such system it has been my misfortune to encounter. With ever more faculty and students making use of this execrable system, it no longer makes sense hosting a separate CMS on my office servers. Consequently I have removed the Moodle CMS that has, with one or two exceptions, proved stable and easy to use. The removal of this CMS has also removed the necessity of maintaining an IP-reachable server. However, the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp domain will be preserved for the immediate future, as a test-bed for experiments with on-demand materials. |
| Jan 03 | In a further experiment, I've published an unfinished work of fiction (Psychic Dawn) to the Leanpub site. The Leanpub philosophy is to encourage writers to publish early and often, amending unfinished books in response to feedback from early readers. Pricing is flexible. Readers can download a free sample of the first chapter, or the entire book, for anything from the minimum price of $0.99, to the requested price of $4.99, to the physical maximum of $500.00. |
| 2013 | |
| Nov 20 | As part of my ongoing study of epublishing, I've uploaded two books (Psychic Awakening and Personal Business Correspondence) to the Leanpub site. The latter is a partial reprint of a textbook that went out of print several years ago. The former is a novel written under a pseudonym. |
| 2010 | |
| Nov 5 | Questions Generated by Japanese Students of English has been added to the Publications section. |
| Sep 17 | Hardware and software update of the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp domain is complete. Web services are being provided by two headless Mac Mini computers, one running Mac OS X Server. One book and one article have been added to the publication list and an article on UK Police Jargon to the library. |
| 2009 | |
| Mar 09 | School of Commerce faculty offices have moved from Building 9 to the newly reconstructed Building 11. The servers hosting the Moodle course support system and other educational facilities are now located in Building 11, and this move has necessitated allocation of new IP addresses. The domain names of the servers remain unchanged. The move provided an opportunity to make some signficant hardware and software updates to the domain servers, some of which are still incomplete. The system should be completely functional by the start of the new academic year in April. |
| 2007 | |
| May 26 | A complete set of Donald L. Philippi's Technical Japanese Translation newsletter is now available on this site. |
| Apr 05 | The first four issues of Donald L. Philippi's Technical Japanese Translation newsletter have been added to this site. Further issues will be posted as the work of scanning and conversion continues. |
| 2006 | |
| Mar 20 | The entire site has been updated. All pages are now XHMTL-compliant and formatted using CSS. Course Management Systems has been added to the Publications section. |
| 2005 | |
| Nov 04 | A Visit to Bateman's has been added to the Publications section. The Useful Links page has been removed. |
| 2004 | |
| Aug 12 | I shall be away from Japan for twelve months, visiting Duke University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. I can be reached at my usual email address. |
| May 14 | Automatic forwarding of email sent to my old mn.waseda.ac.jp address ended in March 2004. The only valid address is the one accessible from the top page of this site. |
| 2003 | |
| The lack of activity on this site is a reflection of increasing use of the buda.cache.waseda.ac.jp experimental domain which hosts numerous course-related portals and bulletin boards. | |
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2002 |
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| May 10 | Quotations in Network Messages has been added to the Publications section. |
| May 09 | Electronic Network Communication has been added to the Publications section. |
| May 06 | The Formatting of Network Messages has been added to the Publications section. |
| May 01 | Language Shift in Australia and Canada has been added to the Publications section and revisions made to the two papers uploaded last month (see below). The CSS superscript tags did not display correctly on Netscape 4.x browsers. |
| Apr 10 | Two papers have been added to the Publications section: The Literature of British India and Rudyard Kipling's 'The Ballad of East and West'. Unlike previous HTML conversions, these two papers were formatted using XHTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). Any comments about legibility would be much appreciated. |
| 2000 | |
| Oct 09 | In addition to the student forums on my office server, I've created an English Q&A forum. Please post any queries you might have about English or English usage, and I'll try to answer them as quickly as possible. |
| Sep 30 | Basic chat/forum services are available on my office server and visitors are welcome to drop by and leave messages. Also, I've added a couple of relatively new search sites to the links page and removed one that was showing its age. |
| 1999 | |
| Jun 15 | Because of the cancellation of today's classes, students taking the Oral Expression course will be asked to submit a short additional assignment. Content and format of the assignment will be announced next week. |
| May 15 | The Email Guidelines pages have been moved from demon.co.uk and are now available on this server. I've corrected a few mistakes, and will be adding two or three pages in the near future. Please check back from time to time. |
| Mar 28 | An HTML version of "Language Choice", a short essay on multilingualism, has been added to the Publications page. |
| Feb 01 | Although the Links page still features links to a number of online English-language newspapers, they have been made redundant by the excellent Internet Public Library site, which maintains an exhaustive list of links to newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Highly recommended! |
| 1998 | |
| Nov 02 | The English I (Conversation) class on Monday, Nov 17 (Period 3) will be held in the No. 3 Computer Room in Building 12. Details of the change will be given during the regular Nov 10 lesson. |
| Oct 30 | I'm considering setting up an inter-class, inter-university mailing list for all students who are taking (or have taken) one of my network communication courses. If you have any ideas about guidelines for the list, I'd appreciate hearing from you. |
| Jul 14 | Another useful resource for students taking email classes is the Beginner's Guide to Effective Email. Strongly recommended. |
| Apr 28 | There will be no Effective Writing class on Thursday, May 1. However, the deadline for Assignment 1 remains unchanged, and students must send their email introductions before noon on that day. The period for Assignment 2 will be May 1 to May 8. Please do not send Assignment 2 until you have received (and read!) an email announcement giving details of the content and format. |
| Apr 22 | Students taking my Effective Writing email class may be interested in some Email Guidelines I've posted. The guidelines include sample messages and a find-the-mistakes quiz. |
| 1997 | |
| Nov 28 | The usual Thursday assignment for the Effective Writing class will be given on Monday, December 2, and the deadline for submissions will be noon on the following Monday. |
| Nov 25 | By way of experiment, I've created an HTML version of a short essay entitled "Armageddon and the New Age" and linked it to the Publications page. |
| Nov 23 | Several new links have been added to the Links page. The new Infoseek search engine looks very good indeed, and metasearch sites such as all4one and MetaCrawler promise to make Web searches even more quick and efficient. |
| Nov 14 | Seminar presentations have been pushed back one week. The first presentation will be on Nov 21, and subsequent presentations at one-week intervals. |